Did you ever imagine you could step inside your home appliance to explore every nut and chip? Or be able to ‘3D screen’ the turkey in your oven so you know, in real-time, whether your dinner is ready? What about your oven being intelligent enough to interact with you, understand your habits, and even give you tips about your daily nutrition? This is the premise behind the new project – Open Oven – for Hotpoint-Ariston being unveiled during Eurocucina at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile (Milan, 8th – 13th April 2014). Open Oven literally opens up the oven to the public, allowing us to explore, first-hand, the magic world of technology inside our ovens today, and how new technologies are radically changing the functions that will be available in our ovens tomorrow.

Our home appliances have become much alike the computers we use everyday. The electronics we find inside our computers have permeated all our domestic objects and are allowing us – in the era of Internet of Things – to be able to communicate directly with all of them through a single device. How is this impacting our kitchens, and in particular the oven? Open Oven dissects the oven into its various components and displays them in their exploded form, so that we can explore the vast amount of technology inside them, their functions and benefits, as well as experience new product usages and lifestyles.

Visitors learn how connectivity, through the integration of advanced sensors, enables the transformation of the oven into a networked, context aware and user sensitive product that can host and offer new interactive and digital services. The Open Oven experience is organized in a linear path, allowing visitors to examine the impact of new technologies on the oven in terms of design, safety, comfort, food care, cleaning, energy saving, and connectivity.

The experience continues by focusing on the possibilities that these new technologies hold. Virtual sensors in our appliances can already help us to monitor and manage our energy consumption. In the future, advanced sensors in your oven will be able to gather data on the dishes that we prepare, while your personal smart bracelet monitors your mood, your state of health and your physical activity; together they can create an intelligent instrument for the quantified self, able to adapt to our habits and needs, teaching us more about what we are eating and helping us to improve our quality of life. Simply by placing the ingredients in the oven, it will be able to weigh them with precision, and create a perfect cooking program so all you have to do is turn the oven on with a single click. With the latest 3D digital imaging techniques we can find out what point the cooking is at, even from another room – becoming infallible chef and discovering in real-time the properties and cooking status of our food .

Credits

OPEN OVEN, an Indesit Company project - developed for Hotpoint-Ariston at Eurocucina 2014, by Carlo Ratti Associati with NUSSLI Italia Srl and ToDo; photos by MyBossWas.